DocWatts

Political scientists and historians haven't had any trouble defining and identifying fascism. Are experts on this subject just flat out wrong when they identify a number or early warning signs of fascism in a place like the United States? I have to wonder if in your view enforcing social norms against harmful and destructive behavior has any utility at all, if you see identifying and calling out fascism as counter productive. I do agree that we shouldn't treat fascists as 'The Other', but at the same time we also have a basic social responsibility to make sure that fascism isn't something that becomes socially acceptable.

The benefit of calling out fascism is to push back against a violent fringe ideology becoming normalized in our culture. Subscribing to fascist ideology should remain as socially unacceptable as openly declaring that you're okay with pedophilia. Fascists have been working to make this ideology more palatable for mainstream acceptance, and it's something that needs to be called out and pushed back against. You can do that without dehumanizing people who've been manipulated and exploited by fascist ideology.

1) Marx is one of the most influential political philosphers in all of world history, and his critiques of exploitation under capitalism are worth understanding regardless of whether one considers themselves a 'Marxist'. If you consider BLM a Marxist organization, it sure sounds like you don't have any understanding of the things your criticizing. You're basically sock puppeting recycled McCarthy era propaganda that was directed at the Civil Rights movement, which tried to discredit any and all social reform movements as 'Marxist' (and also claimed that Marth Luther King was the most dangerous person in America). 2) Sure sounds like you're equating vandalism and looting with terrorist violence, murder, and organized attempts to end democracy.

While it's true that the crowd largely consisted of gullible idiots taken in by a charismatic con man, that doesn't change the fact that it was it was an organized attempt to prevent a democratic election from being certified with tacit approval from several high ranking Republican politicians. And that elected representatives narrowly avoided being murdered by some of these folks. Alexandria Occasio Cortez narrowly avoided being abducted and possibly murdered by men who broke in to her office, and some men were also planning to abduct and possibly murder vice president Mike Pence. While it was less a serious attempt to overthrow the government than it was a show of force and a dress rehearsal for future coup attempts, it's a bad portent of things to come. Most of the people who were charged got off with relatively light sentences (less than a few years), and the Republican Party has actively been trying to obstruct investigations in to the affair (such as why the Capital Hill Police were completely unprepared that day), because Trump and several others were complicit. Hitler also launched a botched coup attempt in the 1920s, but just because it was farcical failure didn't prevent him from successfully ending democracy a decade later.

@vizual Was it BLM and Marxists that staged an attempted coup a year ago? Or was it right wing terrorists? Far right terrorists are responsible for more deaths due to terrorist violence than literally any other group or ideology in the United States (according to the FBI). This is literally a recycled Nazi conspiracy theory; namely that social justice organizations are the work of a degenerate cabal of Jews and Marxists to destabilize society and subvert Western culture. Not accusing you of being a Nazi, but it might help to be aware of the origins of the argument that you're making. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory

There are legitimate critiques to be made of Marxism, but painting a false equivalency between the two (especially in a contemporary context where fascist terrorists are murdering people and actively working to destroy democracy in the United States) is hugely unproductive. Plus, Marxism has basically zero political representation in the United States whilst fascist sympathizers have been making inroads towards actual positions of power; both in the Republican Party and also in law enforcement (the latter is something the FBI has been warning about).

Fascism relies on conspiracy theories and on unjustifiable claims of persecution for members of the dominant ethno-cultural group to fuel its egoicly gratifying delusions. Which is where ludicrous ideas that Christians or white men are a persecuted minority ultimately come from, or that mask requirements during a pandemic are equivalent to anti-Semitism in 1930s Germany. Because once you rip away these delusions the entire ideology falls apart, hence why you can't engage a fascist sympathizers in good faith. And why we should be calling out Bad Faith arguments so that ourselves and others don't get drawn in to debates with people who employ them. That doesn't mean we can't be compassionate towards people who fall in to toxic ideologies (no one joins a white supremacist gang because thier life is going awesome), but we'd be better off manuevering around them and doing what we can to make sure they can't amass political power rather than spending time and energy arguing and debating.

It seems highly likely that the United States will backslide to a hybrid (meaning a mixed democratic / authoritarian) regime within the next ten or so years. Democracy will probably continue to function at the level of States and Cities, but on a federal level the substance of democracy will be eroded to the point that the US could no longer be considered to be a full democracy by most metrics. Following the template laid down by other hybrid regimes, the facade of democracy will be maintained for purposes of plausible deniability (ie people in Russia still vote), but structural and legal barriers will be erected to prevent challenging parties from having any realistic chance of winning future elections. To analogize a bit, while it's possible for someone to walk on a tightrope for a few hours without plummeting to thier doom, it's not reasonable to expect that to happen every day for ten years without incident. Even if it's not in 2022 and 2024, at some point Republicans are going to have the Legislative majorities needed to facilitate the slow moving coup they've been working towards. The unfortunate truth is that anti-democratic structural elements within US institutions (such as the filibuster, and the undemocratic make up of the Supreme Court and Senate) are preventing the very reforms that could safeguard democracy long enough for democratization efforts to begin to address larger systemic reforms. Of course a regime marked by the kind of corruption, incompetence, and cronyism of Trump and his contemporaries is ultimately unsustainable in a country like the US, and will burn itself out given enough time. Of course this will entail harm to millions of people in the course of this, and further delay any tangible action on existential threats such as Climate Change. Of course this isn't inevitable so those of us opposed to this course of events should keep fighting, but we shouldn't downplay the gravity of what's at stake going forward. Also it's not as if a hybrid regime can't transition back to democracy as well.

Just because the Republican Party is packed with amoral grifters and fascist sympathizers doesn't mean that they're dumb. Trying to institute a military coup would be bad strategy because it would make what they're doing incredibly obvious (more so than it is now), and it's not at all clear that the military would support them. Rather, the more likely scenario is that they're going to use legal and legislative mechanisms to end democracy, ala Russia, Poland, and Hungary. Really all that would have to happen is to place Trump sycophants in key positions when it comes to certifying the 2024 elections, and to have future GOP lead federal and state legislatures enact structural barriers that make it impossible for other political parties to win elections. When democracies collapse, it tends to be the culmination of a lengthy period of societal decline where democracy isn't meeting the needs of the society, opening a space for Bad Faith demagogues to use societal feelings of alienation and resentment for the purposes of amassing political Power. Thank forty years of neoliberal austerity politics under both political parties, and a well oiled Right Wing propaganda machine which benefits by exacerbating cultural divisions, for bringing us to this point. With the incentive structures of Democracy and Capitalism being at cross purposes, political institutions being captured by oligarchs sets the stage for the decline of democracy under Late Stage Capitalism. Add to that easily exploitable cultural divisions during a paradigm shift from Blue/Orange to Green, and this gives Bad Actors who wish to end democracy plenty of opportunities to do so. Without addressing the systemic failures that brought us to this point, the best we can do is try to forestall the collapse of democracy. Addressing these systemic failures would require a broad coalition focused on democratization politics, something that unfortunately our current institutions are inadequate for (the fact that Democratic majorities can't pass something as basic as Voting Rights legislation is a good indicator of this).

Hard to give the basic gist of a philosopher as complex as Hegel, but here's my best shot: The basic gist of Hegel is that he's a process philosopher, concerned with questions of becoming. Central to Hegel's philosophy is the notion of dialectics, in which ideas shape and are shaped by a dynamic interplay of shifting equilibriums. This can be metaphorically thought of in some ways as physical forces interacting and pressing upon each other generating tension, and that these tensions must get resolved in one way or another. The notion that all ideas contain within them thier own negation, and out of this negation new ideas are synthesized, is what for Hegel gives thought its character as evolving and self correcting. Hegel sees thought as an expression of an embodied universal consciousness that's the ontological substrate underlying all of Reality, and is in the process of discovering it's own nature through the dialectical process he describes. Important to note that objective Reality does exist for Hegel, just that it's fundamentally Mental rather than Material. His philosophy can be thought of as a systematic way of explaining how the dynamic interplay between paradigms makes development possible, and in that aspect Hegel can be said to be somewhat of a precursor to thinkers like Ken Wilber and dialectical models such as Spiral Dynamics. Of course, people who are only familiar with Hegel on a very surface level tend to reduce this philosophy down to a simple Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis model, which is a caricature of Hegel rather than an accurate distillation of his philosophy.

To anyone interested in Hegel, I'd suggest that instead of trying to work your way through his dense and impenetrable prose (Hegel being a famously terrible writer), you'd be far better off picking up The Accessible Hegel as a starting point. Like it's name suggests, it makes Hegel's work accessible without dumbing it down. Or trying to reduce it to a Materialist philosophy (ala Marx and Zizek).

Sad that basic maintenance of the country's infrastructure is considered an 'achievement' in some sense, but considering the dysfunctional nature of our declining democracy here in the 'States I guess we have to take what small wins we can.

From the title of this thread I'd thought Leo had done another game related vlog post

The only way to transcend Capitalism short of a global catastrophe that forces humanity's hand (and also narrows the scope of responses we have available), is to outcompete Capitalism on its own terms. Outcompeting Capitalism on its own terms would mean showing people the possibility that other systems can deliver 'the goods' of material prosperity (or at the very least a life of relative comfort and security), without the destructive and exploitative elements of Capitalism. This of course will have to take in to account that Capitalist mechanisms will work to destroy any other competing system, something that will have to be accounted for and guarded against. Global capitalism basically needs the modern equivalent of a Gorbachev; someone who understands the rules of the system well enough to work within the system to change things. In this context, that would also entail understanding how political system capture works under Capitalism, and what a process to untangle that would be.

David Foster Wallace (an early metamodern writer in the 90s and 200s) put it quite nicely. To paraphrase: Postmodern deconstruction has been incredibly useful and important for pointing out what's hypocritical, stupid, and cruel. Once that's done, however, postmodernism generally lacks better, positive values it can inculcate in the vacuum of what's been deconstructed. The result is a dearth of sincerity, and in the absence of positive values is a pervasive (and tiresome) postmodern irony, one which scoffs : "How dare you have the audacity to ask me what it is I really mean?"

Meh. I was less impressed than I was expecting, as the talk didn't feel very productive (even aside from it unraveling at the end). Mr. Girl came across as overly defensive and a bit argumentative, and didn't 'sell' Yellow values very well. I knew what he was getting at, but he really should have put more emphasis on the process oriented angle of the meta-ideology, and done more to articulate how taking a more compassionate approach towards other ideologies is a more successful way to address societal problems that Green cares about. Selling Yellow as a more full expression of Green would have been the way to go, instead of the way the conversation actually went.

I have to wonder whether Obama's personal friendship with McCain (himself an honorable guy) gave him false hope that the Republican Party eventually would come around, and that the Bad Faith obstructionism which would eventually bloom into the Cult of Trump was a passing fad. Unfortunately he was wrong on that account, something that Joe Biden fortunately learned from. Obama was obviously a sophisticated thinker and gifted politician, and probably could have been a great President in a more functional political environment where both sides were mostly operating in Good Faith. If you recall the political instability that tends to happen when streams of refugees escaping a civil war from places like Syria bring to the rest of the world, imagine what's going to happen when hundreds of millions of people are displaced due to Climate Change. That's in addition to the trillions of dollars of economic damage that's going to accumulate from currently livable coastal areas being under water, and from extreme weather events such as fires and hurricanes. A World War 2 scale mobilization towards sustainable technology is really the only appropriate response at this point. Perhaps it wouldn't need to be so if the problem wasn't swept under the rug for as long as it has, but unfortunately as substantative action was continually not taken the scope of adequate responses is narrowed over time. Getting every major country in the world off from fossil fuels needs to addressed with the same urgency as if it's the 1940s and Germany was thought to be developing an atomic bomb. A large portion of what countries like the United States spend on thier military needs to be shifted towards treating Climate Change as a national security threat. And this will likely involve the affluent nations of the world having to subsidize renewables in the developing world as well, because it's not enough for places like the US and Western Europe to switch over to sustainable energy if the largest countries in the world are still burning fossil fuels. Rather than the 'turning back the clock to pre-industrial times' that you alluded to, it would be the exact opposite; massive investments in technological development to make industrial civilization sustainable.

You can have both you know, they're not mutually exclusive. A philosopher like Hegel is a good embodiment of using both in mutually reinforcing ways.

I'd disagree with Barrack Obama being Yellow, but even if he was it wasn't to his advantage because he ended up being taken advantage of by Republicans who weren't operating in Good Faith. What substantative progress would you say that he made on any systemic problems during his time in office? Joe Biden (with the benefit of hindsight) at least has enough wisdom to realize that the other side of the isle isn't negotiating in good faith, and Biden isn't wasting political capital trying to onboard people who are trying to nuke his presidency (and American democracy, for that matter) Someone like Noam Chomsky is also a Yellow thinker, so Yellow doesn't necessarily preclude being highly critical of existing structures and institutions. Centrism, while seemingly the most 'reasonable' position, isn't by default always the most appropriate response to every situation. I would also argue that centrism isn't necessarily a mark of Yellow, although Yellow can use centrism in certain situationally appropriate scenarios. For example the 'middle of the road' stance on something like Climate Change (such as market based solutions like Cap and Trade) might have been adequate if they had been adopted and consistently applied 30 years ago. But it's entirely inadequate to avoid a climate apocalypse after three decades of doing nothing of substance to address an existential threat.

(Mods : could you please move this to Society and Politics) According to the US Department of Education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States Yet another way that the United States is failing its citizens (add that to the list next to a predatory health care system, failing infrastructure, and a predatory economic system). Might help contextualize the widespread lack of basic media literacy in the 'States, why a large segment of the population is easy prey for political propaganda and conspiracy theories, and why predatory advertising is so successful.

@Knowledge Hoarder The notion that knowledge consists of 'one damned fact after another' is an impoverished view of what knowledgeable is. A more holistic approach, where one has a sense of why something is worth knowing and what broadly speaking are the dynamics behind it, is more worthy of taking up mental hard disc space than memorizing endless lists of facts and figures.

@Happy Lizard While I think you're on to something (as English as a second language is over-represented in these figures), I think has far more to do with inter-generational poverty. Because public schools are funded though local property taxes, the quality of the education one receives growing up is tied to the zip code that one is born to. There are a lot of areas in the country where you'd be forgiven for thinking that you're in a third world country rather than the richest nation on earth, and that's reflected in the inequalities of the US education system.

To be fair learning how to be compassionate towards other people with whom you have a gut level disagreement about basic values is an acquired skill (to put it mildly). It brings to mind how a gay friend of mine expressed the pain of having family members support political ideologies that work to rescind thier right to live openly and authentically, and I don't necessarily think thier resentment towards people who hold these views is unreasonable. Compassion often runs up against the wall of conflicting survival needs. From the perspective of those who occupy a precarious position in society, it's completely understandable how it can feel as if others are seemingly going out of thier way to make life more difficult for you than it needs to be. Developing compassion in these types of scenarios requires sociological understanding and a degree of ego maturity, and naturally not everyone has been given the opportunity to develop in both of these areas. SD-Yellow (where much of judgemental nature of Green is transcended) comes from a place of privilege, after all.

Haven't seen nearly as many threads for the Big Five as I have for other horizontal models such as Myer-Briggs, so I thought it might be interesting to start a thread where we can post our results. The personality traits being measured by this model are: Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism Here's a link to the test: https://www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-test And my results:

To take an everyday example for illustrative purposes, consider hot and cold. The dualistic conception of this is as two distinct and opposing forces (if you have more of one that means you have less of the other). Whereas the non-dualistic perception of this same phenomena would see hot and cold as two sides of the same coin of a qualitative discernment that we call temperate. If you extrapolate this kind of discernment towards the conceptual categories that we use to atomize reality in to discrete objects, you'll begin to discover that our normal egoic ways of categorizing don't hold up to epistemological scrutiny (however useful said categorization happens to be in our day to day lives). This can be extended to subject-object dualism, and to illusion that your body is a container with a clear boundary between your body/mind and the rest of reality.